Quote:
Originally Posted by ParadiseFalls
You can't really be offensively tall because being tall isn't the result of the complete inability to control yourself. It's not a fault. The way I look is.
What about offensively schizophrenic (if lack of control is such a "fault")?
I think "offensive obesity" is a myth, because obesity isn't so much a "complete inability to control yourself," as it is a matter of ineffective weight loss strategies being perpetuated because the myth of moral failing being the primary cause of obesity. Most of what passes for "common wisdom" about obesity and effective weight loss strategies is just plain wrong. We're so interested in "blame" that we don't even try to find out what works and why. That doesn't matter nearly as much as making the obese person feel bad for being obese.
I've studied obesity and weight loss nearly all of my life. I was put on my first diet at age 5, and have been on the dieat rollercoaster ever since. There were only three or four years in my entire life (after the first four) in which I didn't try to diet in some part of every year).
Dieting the way I was taught (the way everyone is taught) did more to make me fatter than it ever helped in getting the weight permanently off.
The more I've read, the more the myth is shattered of the "out-of-control obese person."
Obesity is hard to treat effectively because the strategies we've been taught just don't work. And when they don't work, we're told we're just not trying hard enough. We're weak, we're lazy, crazy, or stupid.
It's pure hogwash. Obesity is a growing problem in the USA - growing so fast that the obesity rates have more than doubled in the last 30 years. If it were just a matter of "control" you would expect the crime rate, the unemployment rate and the education rate to have plummeted. They haven't. We're not lazier, crazier, or more stupid. We're just getting very bad advice on how to eat and how to go about health and weight management.
An obese person is no more "out of control" than a skinny type II diabetic. Both are lifestyle mediated disorders. Yet we don't label the type II diabetic "offensive." Nor do we label the paraplegic who was injured driving drunk as an "offensive cripple."
The more you read on obesity research, the more you see the environmental and biochemical contributors of weight loss, and yet we still continue to label the fat person as out-of-control and "disgusting" even more so than alcoholics and drug-addicts. Out-of-control behaviors that involve illegal activity often don't carry the negative stigma of obesity. It's rather sad that obesity gets less compassion than other equally "out-of-control" behaviors.
Many people argue that even hinting at physiological contributors to obesity is a way for fatties to justify or make excuses or defer blame, because God-forbid a fattie not hate themselves. Personally, I wasn't able to gain any semblance of control over my obesity, until I started understanding some of these physiological factors.
You can't control what you don't understand, and we don't as a culture understand obesity very well. If you read these books (and the research they're built on), you'll have a hard time villifying anyone including yourself for "lack of control." (You'll also have better and more effective tools for weight loss and weight management).
The End of Overeating by David Kessler
Refuse to Regain by Barbara Berkely
Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata
Good Calories Bad Calories by Gary Taubes (and his other books too)